12 New Books We’re Reading This Summer (and 6 Not So New)

“Knowing you have something good to read before bed,” Vladimir Nabokov wrote, “is among the most pleasurable of sensations.” It’s easy to feel similarly about summer. Knowing you’ve got a few fine books tucked away for beach or lawn is akin to bliss.

The Times’s book critics and staff members are here with some recommendations. They have each chosen three books: two that will be published this summer that are especially appealing and one older title that they’ve set aside for longer and warmer days. DWIGHT GARNER

Dwight Garner

THE GIRLS by Emma Cline (Random House). Here’s the debut novel that the publishing world can’t stop talking about. It’s a coming-of-age story, set in Northern California in the late 1960s, that involves a thoughtful teenage girl who drifts into a Charles Manson-like cult. This promises to be a perceptive page-turner, a volume to haunt summer’s warm nights. (June 14)

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DIANE ARBUS: PORTRAIT OF A PHOTOGRAPHER by Arthur Lubow (Ecco). Diane Arbus is one of the most important and unsettling figures in the history of photography, known for her pictures of people on the margins — dwarfs, cross-dressers, giants, sideshow freaks. Mr. Lubow’s biography of this pioneering artist, the subject of an expansive show at the Met Breuer opening on July 12, is the first since Patricia Bosworth’s in 1984, and it looks serious, sensitive and wide-ranging. (June 7)

FROM THE BOOKSHELF “Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About: The Complete Novels of Charles Wright.” The books in Wright’s New York City trilogy — “The Messenger,” “The Wig” and “Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About” — were published from 1963 to 1973. They’re about a young, working-class black intellectual, and they are said to be (by a friend I trust) brutal, pessimistic and scaldingly funny. I’ve found a beat-up old copy online, and I can’t wait to read Wright for the first time.

Jennifer Senior

THE INNOCENT HAVE NOTHING TO FEAR by Stuart Stevens (Alfred A. Knopf). Face it: You’re going to hear about the 2016 presidential race all summer long, unless you spend your vacation in a missile silo. You may as well milk it for laughs, as Mr. Stevens — Republican political strategist, former television writer, all-around nonfiction guy — appears to have done in this novel, his second. The main character is a populist, anti-immigrant Republican presidential candidate. Whatever gave him that idea? (June 28)

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HERE COMES THE SUN by Nicole Dennis-Benn (Liveright). This novel may take place in Jamaica, but do not mistake it for a traditional beach read. It’s for readers who want to know what’s really behind the lacquered smile of the desk clerk at that lovely resort in Montego Bay, and what the pleasant woman at the market is really thinking when she sells tourists her jewelry and trinkets. The answers are often far less pretty than the scenery, but all evidence suggests that this debut deserves its ballyhoo. (July 19)

FROM THE BOOKSHELF “Something Fresh” by P. G. Wodehouse. Whenever a friend is down in the dumps, I purchase a stack of Bertie and Jeeves novels and pop them in the mail, on the theory that there is no blight of the soul that can’t be healed by their company. Yet I have never read a single one of Wodehouse’s Blandings novels, which seems like both a literary sin and a crime against my own mood. So here’s to the first of the lot, which I’m guessing won’t just be something fresh, but something marvelous.

John Williams

YOU’LL GROW OUT OF IT by Jessi Klein (Grand Central Publishing). Earlier in the 2000s, I occasionally caught Ms. Klein’s sharply nerdy stand-up comedy in New York. She’s since built a formidable career mostly behind comedy’s scenes, including her current role as the head writer for “Inside Amy Schumer.” Now she’s publishing a book of autobiographical essays, and her brain seems particularly well suited to make the transition from stage to page. (July 12)

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NINETY-NINE STORIES OF GOD by Joy Williams (Tin House Books). Ms. Williams deservedly expanded her fan base last year with a collection of new and selected stories, “The Visiting Privilege.” This bite-size follow-up is a stunt of sorts, 99 very short pieces — some just a sentence or two — directly or indirectly about the divine. I imagine the subject and Ms. Williams’s mordancy will make a good match. (July 12)

FROM THE BOOKSHELF “Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Brontë. There’s a blurry place in my memory where books I was never assigned overlap with books I was assigned but neglected to read. I’m already 200 pages in, so this is a seasonal aspiration very likely to be fulfilled. I might follow it up with Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights.” Opinions seem to vary, and in interesting ways, about which book is superior. I’d like to join the jury.

Alexandra Alter

HOMEGOING by Yaa Gyasi (Alfred A. Knopf). This ambitious debut novel opens in 18th-century Ghana and follows seven generations of a family that descends from two half sisters who never knew each other: Effia, who marries an English colonial officer and lives in a coastal palace; and Esi, who is captured and sold into slavery. The novel spans more than 250 years and several continents as the sisters and their descendants wrestle with the physical and psychic scars of slavery and colonialism. (June 7)

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UNDERGROUND AIRLINES by Ben H. Winters (Mulholland Books). In this alternate history, Mr. Winters imagines a horrific modern-day America where the Civil War never happened, and slavery still exists. The persistence of American slavery is a popular alternate-history plotline, along with the Nazis’ winning World War II, but Mr. Winters carves out fresh territory by blending genres, adding elements of detective fiction. His weary and haunted protagonist, a former slave who calls himself Victor, works as a bounty hunter who tracks down escaped slaves for the United States Marshals Service. He’s on the trail of a man named Jackdaw when his mission, and the painful bargain he’s made with his minders and himself, begin to unravel. (July 5)

FROM THE BOOKSHELF Carlo Rovelli’s “Seven Brief Lessons on Physics” (Riverhead Books). I’ve wanted to read Mr. Rovelli’s surprise best seller ever since a reviewer said his breezy “tone would give Brian Cox a run for his quarks.” In just 88 pages, he explores mind-bending topics in physics, like gravitational waves, the heat of black holes and quantum gravity. It sounds like the rare book about physics that can be ingested in a single sitting, which I hope to do sometime this summer.

Sarah Lyall

I AM NO ONE by Patrick Flanery (Tim Duggan Books). Summer is a great time for creepiness and paranoia, and so I’m looking forward to “I Am No One.” In this novel, strange things are happening to a New York University professor who has recently returned from abroad. He seems to be under surveillance of the most insidious and unnerving kind. It’s a terrible predicament to be in, but is he hiding something? (July 5)

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MODERN LOVERS by Emma Straub (Riverhead Books). While you’re lazing around on the beach, three college friends and former bandmates, now in the throes of middle age, are spending their summer confronting hard truths about their pasts while dealing with their suddenly sexually active teenagers. Secrets unravel, and revelations are made, not just about them but about a fourth band member who became famous on her own. (Tuesday)

FROM THE BOOKSHELF “In Search of Lost Time” by Marcel Proust. I’ve never read Proust. Now is the time. A few of us from various parts of the country (and Canada) have decided to read “In Search of Lost Time” together and record our spur-of-the-moment thoughts in a group Google document. We’ve just started. Our reactions are all over the place. So far so good.

Jennifer Schuessler

HEROES OF THE FRONTIER by Dave Eggers (Alfred A. Knopf). After fictional forays to Silicon Valley (“The Circle”) and Saudi Arabia (“A Hologram for the King”), Mr. Eggers takes his dark vision of 21st-century American confusion to the wilds of Alaska. In this adventure-novel-meets-moral-inquiry, a Midwestern single mother at the end of her rope cruises the scenic byways in a rickety R.V. with her two children, dodging raging wildfires, tourist traps, personal demons and epically bad weather, ultimately digging deep to find something close to old-fashioned courage. (July 26)

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BEING A BEAST by Charles Foster (Metropolitan Books). Dr. Foster is a British veterinarian, but don’t come to “Being a Beast: Adventures on the Species Divide” expecting James Herriot. In an effort to truly understand animals, Dr. Foster spent weeks burrowing like a badger on a Welsh hillside (earthworms for dinner, anyone?); swimming with river otters (catching fish with your teeth is harder than it looks); and skulking in alleyways with London’s urban foxes, among other escapades. “It’s a sort of literary shamanism,” he writes in this wildly eccentric and chatty book, “and it’s been fantastic fun.” (June 21)

FROM THE BOOKSHELF “The Master and Margarita” by Mikhail Bulgakov. I’m not usually big on rereading — there are far too many new books to get to — but this year I’m planning to go back to Bulgakov’s darkly fantastical novel, which describes what happened when the Devil himself strolled into Moscow one summer day in the 1930s. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have revised their translation for the 50th anniversary of the novel that, as Boris Fishman puts it in an introduction, “has proved its bitter prescience about the way of the world again and again.”

Correction:June 1, 2016

An article on Friday about books recommended for summer reading, using information from a publicist, referred incorrectly to Stuart Stevens’s coming novel, “The Innocent Have Nothing to Fear.” It is his second novel, not his first.